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Martin Blaser, professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University

Obesity, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. Asthma, allergies, celiac disease. Have you ever wondered why their incidence is on the rise? Let’s consider obesity for a moment. In 1990, one in ten adults in the United States was overweight. Nowadays, that number has risen to one in three, and one in ten adults is obese. According to the World Health Organisation, the problem affects people worldwide, including those in underdeveloped countries, so fat-rich diets and increased food intake cannot be the only explanation.

Then why are we getting fatter?

Martin Blaser, professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University, has a theory. He believes that some of our modern medical practices are to blame. The main culprit? Antibiotics – or rather, the way we have abused these antibacterial drugs over the last 70 years. Each one of us hosts a collection of good bacteria, known as the microbiome, that keep us healthy by training our immune system, helping us digest food and making essential vitamins for us. But every time we take an antibiotic, we destroy some of our friendly microbes and perturb this useful alliance, with negative consequences for our health.

Who would have guessed that the same ‘miracle drugs’ that cure us from horrible, deadly infections would – in some ways – make us sicker?

In 2014, Martin Blaser wrote a book entitled “Missing Microbes”, an urgent call to action to stop damaging our precious microbes before it is too late. Martin Blaser visited Stockholm last year to celebrate the release of the Swedish translation of his book. On that occasion, he met our intern Federica Santoro to chat about our bacterial allies and how antibiotic abuse is damaging our health in ways we could never have imagined.

“A big arm of my field now is to think about applications, so that we can either make bacteria do things on demand or stop bacteria from doing things on demand. And those are urgent problems that need solving. So this goofy bioluminescent bacteria led the way to us having this idea that we could never have had, if that bioluminescent bacteria hadn’t been studied.”

Drugs that stop bacteria from talking might be new, powerful antibiotics – a much needed weapon in our never-ending struggle against bacterial infections. On the other hand, drugs that make bacteria chat more could boost the production of biofuels and other industrial goods that bacteria make for us.

In 1990 a young Bonnie Bassler, mesmerized by glow-in-the-dark bacteria that could talk to their peers to coordinate light production, wondered whether other bacteria could talk too. The answer, she soon found out, was yes – including all the nasty bacteria that cause disease. Today, Bonnie Bassleris a professor in molecular biology at Princeton University and an authority in the field of bacterial communication.

Her findings, that all bacteria can talk, revolutionized the way we think of bacteria and opened the doors to important medical and industrial applications.

But the discovery of bacterial communication has given us much more than new drugs. It has shown us how bacteria live in the real world and forced us to reconsider our own human nature – if bacteria are talking, social beings too, how different are we from them after all?

Prick your ears up and follow RadioScience on an exciting tour of the bacterial world and its chatty multilingual inhabitants – after which, we promise, you will never call bacteria boring again!

Bonnie Bassler is an all-round communicator. Not only does she like to talk to bacteria, she is also passionate about sharing her research with the public. In a memorable TED Talk in 2009, she captivated her audience with the tale of the tiny glow-in-the-dark bacterium that changed microbiology forever. In this episode of RadioScience, she tells us why she loves to engage in science communication. And why everyone should take an interest in science – don’t miss it!

Psssst… Remember our previous episode, where we told you about reviving mammoths with the help of a technology called CRISPR? Well, CRISPR is another wonderful product of bacteria! It is the immune system bacteria use to defend themselves from their enemies, now converted into a powerful gene-editing tool. Bacteria are truly full of wonders…